Issue with moving Spamc to remote server

Submitted by rjrsinc on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 05:08 Pro Licensee

Last night I configured an Ubuntu 12.04 base install and then followed the steps to install Spamassassin and Clamav. I made the changes and tested it. It appeared to work well and I left it overnight to check the log files this morning. It appears there is a problem and attached the mail.log from the 12.04. We have Vmin Pro installed on an Ubuntu 8.04 server that is our primary. I switched it back to local scanning because I fear there is a problem. Can you tell me what appears wrong? The file is a zip file, but I added .jpg to the file so it could be uploaded.

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 08:29

That zip file appears to be corrupted (even after renaming it back to .zip).

Is there any chance you could either post the errors you're seeing, or email your log to eric@virtualmin.com? Thanks!

Submitted by rjrsinc on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 10:23 Pro Licensee

Just emailed you the mail.log directly uncompressed. Once we resolve that issue, here are the other questions so I can feel like we are doing this the right way.

1) We have been managing Spamassassin with white lists and deny lists though Vmin on the prod box. Can those lists be moved to the RJRSpaminator?

2) My old sysadmin had created a number of milters that seem to work well. Is there a process to move those so the new system won't have to relearn?

3) Does the email that is caught as spam get placed in the users Spam folder as it had when canning locally?

4) I know that the users cannot manage their own deny and white lists in this setup without doing a jig. Can you provide a link to instructions on setting this up in case a client wants this function?

Thanks

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 13:17

It looks like the errors you're seeing are this here:

May  1 01:01:44 RJRSpaminator1 spamd[2798]: spamd: still running as root: user not specified with -u, not found, or set to root, falling back to nobody
May  1 01:01:44 RJRSpaminator1 spamd[2798]: plugin: eval failed: bayes: (in learn) locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp lockfile /nonexistent/.spamassassin/bayes.lock.RJRSpaminator1.rjrspaminator1.com.2798 for /nonexistent/.spamassassin/bayes.lock: No such file or directory

Which is just saying that the directory it's trying to write the bayes database to doesn't exist.

A few ways to resolve that are --

  • You could either create that directory (making sure that it's owned by the user "nobody")

  • You could edit /etc/default/spamassassin, and specify a -u parameter, giving it a user to run as who has an existing home directory

  • You could set "--helper-home-dir" to a directory such as /tmp, which is writable by the user "nobody"

Submitted by rjrsinc on Sun, 05/20/2012 - 10:09 Pro Licensee

We're going to try this move to the external scanner this evening and test it out over night and tomorrow morning. Currently the email marked as spam is put into a spam folder in the user's account. By using the external server for scanning, does the spam still get put into each user's spam folder in their account? We have written a spam email report that gets sent to each user and I want to make sure that they still have direct access to their spam email.

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 05/20/2012 - 10:23

The behavior of spam email is the same whether the scanning is taking place remotely or locally.

It isn't SpamAssassin that delivers the spam -- SpamAssassin purely marks it as spam (by setting an email header).

Procmail looks for SpamAssassin's tag, and if it's spam, it's Procmail who decides where to deliver it.

So your customers will continue to be able to access the spam messages.